It went largely unnoticed, and untelevised, while Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift were duking it out at the Grammys and a prurient audience waited for another Kanye West moment – but a trio of great American folksingers were also honored: Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, for Best Traditional Blues Recording; Loudon Wainwright III, for the Charlie Poole Project, a two-CD package honoring the Southern banjo player; and Steve Earle, with Best Contemporary Folk album for Townes, his tribute CD to his late, great Texas running buddy, Townes Van Zandt.

Earle will be making his way to Monterey County Saturday to play a benefit sponsored by Death Penalty Focus, a group of attorneys identified with stopping the practice, a cause with which he has long been identified.

He first got involved in the issue after getting to know Jonathan Nobles, a Texas inmate convicted of a double-murder, ultimately witnessing his execution.

“He was not innocent,” Earle has said. “He was guilty of a heinous crime, but he changed a lot during the time he was in prison. He didn’t want to be free, and at first he wasn’t sure that he didn’t want to be executed. But he became involved in Catholicism and through his faith, he arrived at the idea that taking a life was the wrong thing to do. Period.”

Earle wrote about Nobles in “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song),” combining his trademark down-home directness with the inmate’s assumed reflections as he awaited his fate: “I suppose I got it comin’/ I can’t ever pay enough/ All my rippin’ and a runnin’/ I hurt everyone I loved,” ending with a meditation asking forgiveness from the victim’s family: “The world’ll turn around without me/ The sun’ll come up in the east/ Shinin’ down on them that hate me/ I hope my goin’ brings ’em peace.”

Earle has fought his own demons of self-destruction and substance abuse, but came out the other side.

The Grammy win is trivial, except that it honors the memory of Van Zandt, who Earle revered so much he named his son – burgeoning musician Justin Towne Earles, who recently gigged at Slim’s in San Francisco – after him. With typical understatement, he once declared: “Townes Zan Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

These days, music is a family affair for Earle. Besides his son’s career, his sister, Stacey Earle, is a prepossessing performer in her own right, and he’s married to the great songstress Alison Moorer, about to release her own new collection, Crow. Moorer, in turn, is Shelby Lynne’s sister. Mean picking around the kitchen table.

Don’t take my word for it; check out YouTube, or better yet, your local record store, if you still have one, and hear for yourself.

With the hard-edged lyricism of someone who has experienced, and inflicted, love and loss, Earle can come across as Lyle Lovett with anger management problems.

He’s paid homage to his musical roots, with the Washington Square Serenade, an homage to the folkie sound of his newfound Greenwich Village neighbors; and The Mountain, a short-lived collaboration with bluegrass great Del McCoury that ended in a falling-out over Earle’s excessive use of vulgarity. (Earle ends “Transcendental Blues,” the album that includes “Jonathan’s Song,” with a Bill Monroe quote: “Remember, folks, there’s no room for vulgarity in bluegrass.”)

Although there’s no question of his burning political convictions, somehow Earle comes across as the real deal, writing from the depths of his authentic heart, without the posturings of, say, Rage Against The Machine, or even Springsteen, sacrilegious as that might sound.

In “Christmas in Washington,” a pre-inaugural ditty written in the bleak, unlamented Reagan/Bush years, he sardonically observes: “It’s Christmastime in Washington/ The Democrats rehearsed/ Gettin’ into gear for four more years/ Things not gettin’ worse.” Summoning the spirit of Woody Guthrie, and Joe Hill, he makes politics personal: “I sat home in Tennessee/ Staring at the screen/ With an uneasy feeling in my chest/ And I’m wonderin’ what it means.”

He has performed the tune with Joan Baez, whose work he has also produced, but Steve Earle ain’t just another well-meaning folksinger.

The boy has chops, as he demonstrated since breaking out with tunes like “Guitar Town” back in 1986, stepping out of the shadow of Van Zandt, Willie, Waylon and the like to stake out his own artistic territory.

It’s not just agitprop, in the furtherance of a particular cause, though the political beliefs he advocates are inseparable from his identity.

He has heart. And soul. And anger management problems. He wouldn’t be Steve Earle without them.

STEVE EARLE will perform Saturday, Feb. 13, at the Death Penalty Focus benefit taking place 8-11 pm at the DeAnza Ballroom of the Portola Plaza Hotel, 200 Alvarado Plaza, Monterey. $45/advance; $55/at the door. (415) 243-0143, www.deathpenaltyfocus.org.